(This is mainly a message to the author(s), but anyone’s welcome to join the discussion and correct me if I say anything wrong. Also, feel free to correct my Angliche.)

I’m getting to the point where we’re taught about the particle 「は」 (season 2, chapter 6), and I have to say I don’t think the way particles in general and this one in particular are explained is the best/simplest/clearest one.

The first given “trick” to understanding 「は」 is to do as if it was a verb, which it really isn’t (just as “is” and “are” aren’t particles), and that results in a weird, confusing two-verb… concept – you can’t call that a sentence.

I don’t think the course would be overly complexified if you just explained that:
- a particle is a short word or a piece of word that gives the word it’s related to a specific function, without changing its meaning;
- 「は」 is one of these particles, that “do things to words”.

Then you could:
- show us that 「りんご くだもの です」 translates to “It is an apple fruit”;
- point out that it doesn’t mean anything (because you’re still holding our hands);
- explain that we can’t determine which word is the subject (and which one is the object) based solely on the words order, as we do in English, and that we need a little (Wink! Wink!) something to indicate what the subject of the sentence is;
- reveal to us mesmerized kids that that’s precisely what 「は」 does when you stick it at the end of a word;
- and finally have us write 「りんごは くだもの です」 and a bunch of other sentences.

This is kind of how the second explanation goes, translating the subject in something that’s almost the subject in a roundabout manner, but that too results in a “clunky” translation (your words, not mine).

What I humbly suggest your mistake might be here, is that you try making things easier to understand by sticking as much as possible to the grammar your students know (the English one), when it really isn’t necessary since the subject of a sentence is an elementary concept, and when it might actually be a good time to start getting rid of the English grammar and start thinking “Japanese”, while it’s still nice and simple.

I mean… I have zero experience as a teacher, but my explanation is merely a description of how I understood it from the first given examples, and there’s nothing difficult about it, really. I believe I proved it can be explained in a clear manner without a single word more complicated than “subject” or “function” – I guess you can forget about the object, if you don’t want to sound too academic (and possibly boring to some people).
Besides, it doesn’t involve making something that’s not even a word into a verb, or making a noun into a preposition + noun + pronoun. Now, maybe you’ve considered my way of explaining and your experience as a teacher showed that the other two had better results, but I really think that the sooner you’ll tell us “Japanese sentences don’t have the same structure as English ones, so suck it up and get over it while they’re three words long”, the better.

Also, if 「です」 and friends weren’t verbs but some kind of “postpositional… phrases”(?) which only function would be to state something’s past or present attributes, I think that now would be a good time to tell. I don’t think it was said even once that 「です」 meant “to be” and I really feel like it doesn’t, but at that point of the course, some students might have gotten to that conclusion.

So, yeah… That was me trying to help.

Thanks for your time.

• This topic was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by  Brook.
• This topic was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by  Brook.